Public health insurance plans, which cover about 90% of Germans, will not foot the bill, under a decades old law that bars them from covering weight-loss drugs.
Tag Archive for: obesity
The results are based, on average, across two late-stage studies after intensive lifestyle changes or with continued treatment, before patients stopped taking the drug.
The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency said AstraZeneca’s GLP-1 drug for type 2 diabetes, called exenatide and marketed as Bydureon, was also included in the review.
Patient advocates and physicians welcomed the arrival of Wegovy in Germany, where 18.5% of adults are obese, more than the European Union average of 16%. The Robert Koch Institute for public health says diseases linked to excess body weight pose a considerable burden on health and social security systems.
To combat the growing obesity crisis in the United States, four lawmakers reintroduced the Treat and Reduce Obesity Act, which would expand Medicare coverage to include weight management medications.
The rising popularity of highly-effective obesity drugs is weighing on demand for robot-assisted bariatric surgeries, top surgical robots maker Intuitive Surgical said.
The deal comes amid growing demand for weight-loss treatments, whose market size is expected to touch up to $100 billion in a decade.
Novo Nordisk said today its popular weight-loss drug Wegovy will cost 301.91 euros ($338.35) for four weeks of treatment at the highest dose in Germany, as it prepares to launch in Europe’s largest pharmaceutical market at the end of the month.
Only about one-third of patients prescribed a popular weight-loss drug like Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy were still taking it a year later, while total healthcare costs for the group rose sharply, according to an analysis of U.S. pharmacy claims shared with Reuters.
The European Medicines Agency (EMA) is probing Novo Nordisk’s diabetes drug Ozempic and weight-loss treatment Saxenda after Iceland’s health regulator flagged three cases of patients on the drugs thinking about suicide or self-harm.
